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Books, Music, Movies, Art, Politics, Sex, OtherSun, 02 Aug 2015 16:50:32 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.2The Rumpus Interview with Paul Grinerhttp://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-paul-griner/
http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-paul-griner/#commentsFri, 22 May 2015 07:01:17 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=138660Second Life, his just-released story collection Hurry Please I Want to Know, putting real life into fiction, and whether creative writing can be taught.]]>Once upon a time, I took a creative writing class with Paul Griner. It was 2008, and I was a new PhD student in the Humanities program at the University of Louisville. Paul, then the director of the creative writing program in English, had his own students to attend to, but he continued to take an active interest in my writing life long after our semester together was done. Soon after that first class, I took what must have been the most important directed study of my college career. In it, Paul challenged me to write fiction in order to better understand myself as a creative nonfiction writer. To my surprise and delight, this via negativa approach worked! I developed a deeper and more nuanced understanding of essay and memoir as a result of Paul’s guidance during my first official fiction-writing forays.

Now, in my own multi-genre creative writing class, I routinely teach Paul’s story, “The Bleating Lambs, Safe Beneath the Ewes,” which epitomizes everything he does best on the page. The work is compressed, surreal, haunting, and invariably invested in matters of life and death. Paul’s newest work only extends and enhances this literary legacy. Earlier this year, his third novel, Second Life, was released by Counterpoint, and this week his short story collection, Hurry Please I Want to Know was released by Sarabande Books. Lucky for me, he still found a little time for a reunion.

***

The Rumpus: I remember years ago asking you about the relationship between your writing life and your real life. I was trying to keep the question laid-back and open-ended, but what I really wanted to know is what I think a lot of memoirists want to know about their friends who live in short story and novel country: how much “non” do you stir into your fiction? Do people from your life ever make cameos on the page? Do you ever write about yourself in disguise?

Paul Griner: An interesting but difficult question. I’ll start at the end. I don’t ever write about myself in disguise, at least on a conscious level. I was talking to a good friend about this, also a writer, about the difficulty of writing directly from experience. The problem for him—as it is for me—is that the resulting fiction often sounds less like fiction and more like a diatribe or an explanation or a whine. I guess it comes down to this: I don’t find myself all that interesting. I’m far more interested in other people, real or imagined, and they’re the ones who populate my fiction.

As for people from my life making it into my fiction, well, that’s tricky too. Very early on, I wrote a story called “Grass,” which came out in my first collection Follow Me. The main character is a man who lived much of his life in his older brother’s considerable shadow and now spends his waning days taking care of the family graves, including his brother’s. It was loosely based on my great uncle, who was both a very private man and very kind to me. When I was a boy, he took me often to baseball games, taught me how to record a game on a scorecard, et cetera. When I was an adult, he took me around to all the family graves and told me the stories behind each person. I meant the story as an homage to him, but after he read it, he sat down and wrote me a single sentence letter: I will never speak to you again.

It was devastating. I wrote him a long letter in response, and we eventually reconciled, but it spooked me. On the other hand, around the same time, I wrote a story about something that happened to my sister-in-law, and my wife suggested I change the character’s name. I did. When my sister-in-law read it, she said, How come you changed my name? So, I’m not sure what lesson to take from that, other than being very careful about which of your friends or relatives you sneak into your work.

But since then, consciously or not, I’ve rarely used anyone close to me as a character in one of my various fictions—rarely but not never. When my mother was dying, I spent time beside her bed, talking to her, reading to her, just being with her. She was at times coherent, at times not. She would often say things as she was fading in and out, and some were sweet, some painful to hear, and some very funny, sometimes unintentionally so. I wanted a record of that, and when I wrote a story a few years later, “Three Hundred Words of Grief,” I used a lot of those conversations. But I wouldn’t have done so if they didn’t work within the bounds of the story. It’s the final story in my collection, Hurry Please I Want to Know, which Sarabande will publish in May 2015.

Of course in a larger sense, all fiction is autobiographical. If our characters are distant from us in time or locale, of different backgrounds, genders, outlooks, we still must fill in their emotions and thoughts based on what we’ve experienced. The trick is to dig deep enough that such emotions, et cetera, become universal, applicable to anyone at any time.

And one of my favorite moments as a writer happened after a reading I gave from The German Woman. An older woman with a German accent approached me and told me that she’d had to put the book down when she read the scene about the fire bombing of Hamburg during World War II because she’d been a child when it happened and lived through it.

I began to apologize, saying that I’d tried through research to capture the event as realistically as possible, but I was certain to have been off in some ways, perhaps many.

No, she said. I stopped because you had it exactly right.

Which tells me that imagination is often better than pure experience.

Rumpus: Speaking as a memoirist and a confessional poet, I recognize the challenges you mention in writing from “pure experience”—the limitations of trying to transcribe any recollection or notion of a lived reality onto the page. Jeanette Winterson talks about the need to “translate experience into art,” and this strikes me as an imperative that transcends genres and invites a conversation about style.

The first story of yours I ever read is called “Sixty-Three Heads,” and it begins quite unexpectedly and compellingly with these words: “Each night I work on my father’s head, the moist clay staining my hands mahogany to the wrists.” When I went looking for that story again, I found a link to it from Pindeldyboz, a site that archives stories “which defy classification.” Do you see your stories this way?

My first experiences reading your work took me to literary journals and to stories like “Sixty-Three Heads,” “Balloon Rides Ten Dollars,” and “The Bleating Lambs, Safe Beneath the Ewes,” all of which I would classify as surreal in some sense or perhaps even as magical realist storytelling. Would you agree? Or perhaps the better question is how would you describe your style as a storyteller? What makes a signature Paul Griner story?

Griner: This has been a difficult question to answer, and not simply because stepping outside your own work and figuring out how to classify or describe it is rarely easy. Rather, it’s that I see different strains, different influences, running through my work, my writing, my reading, and so trying to sum them up is not easy.

Perhaps a somewhat linear narrative will help. I read always as a child, loved books and then, when I read The Great Gatsby in high school, knew I wanted to write. I made my way forward and backward in reading—Hemingway and Richard Wright, Toni Morrison and Jane Austen, Trollope, Dickens, Flaubert. Most of those writers are considered realists. I loved the Russians—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, but also Turgenev and Babel. I moved between novels and stories. Then I began to read more widely—Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield and Katherine Porter, Faulkner, Flannery and Frank O’Connor. Then the South Americans, Borges, and, especially the great Brazilian Machado De Assis, an exact contemporary of Twain’s, but whose work reads as if it was just written. Other Brazilians followed, especially Clarice Lispector, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, and Lydia Fagundes Telles. And I read and read stories endlessly—Chekhov, Baldwin, William Trevor—and more modern masters,Wolff, Carver, Bowles—Paul and Jane—Murakami, Robison, and Barthelme. From that list, you can tell my influences have been all over the place, and I think my stories range pretty widely too. Some of the stories you mention are in the upcoming collection, some not; it’s a culling of nineteen years of work, about half experimental/surrealist, half straightforward realism. It took a long time to settle on which stories to include—and in this, Sarah Gorham, Jeff Skinner, and Kirby Gann at Sarabande were a great help—and even longer to figure out what order I wanted them in.

Deciding what holds them together is tougher still. Looking at the table of contents, I’d say they’re often concerned with the same issues or ideas or problems, whatever form the stories themselves take: the pleasures and pressures and constrictions and bounties of family life what we’re willing to do or to sacrifice in order to fit in or be accepted, to feel a sense of belonging; the immense human desire for friendship and the toll loneliness can take; the thrill of love; the enduring, ennobling and sometimes crippling power of memory. I hope all of them are entertaining and, possibly, enlightening. One final thing on the question of form: I don’t think about form when I’m writing. That is, the material tells me how it needs to be handled. Later, once the form is a given, I’ll edit accordingly, but during the writing it’s never a concern.

Rumpus: What you’ve described here as “all over the place,” in terms of both reading and writing, is something I relate to and greatly admire in the writers whose work I follow and seek to emulate. Your first story collection, Follow Me, and your first novel, Collectors, are the most similar in style in my estimation, given that they left me as a reader with a similarly haunted feeling, a pervasive unsettledness. I liked that feeling and went seeking more. The next novel, The German Woman, is still haunted, but in quite a different way. The book is heavily researched, as you mention above, and all told, it comprises some of the most powerful and incisive historical fiction I’ve read to date.

Now you have the forthcoming story collection from Sarabande, Hurry Please I Want to Know, as well as the recently released novel, Second Life, which ventures into decidedly dark and surreal terrain. I’d like to hear more about the novel—what inspired you to write it and in what ways your previous collections primed you to write it—but also how you balance the short story writing with the novel writing in your life. Debra Dean, another fiction writer I know and have interviewed in the past, speaks of her strong need to be “serially monogamous” with her writing projects. I suspect yours is a more many-pots-on-the-stove approach, but I’d like to know more. Do you write stories concurrently with novels? Does the short form bolster the long form or vice versa? In other words, help me better understand the capaciousness of your creative output.

Griner: I’m both monogamous and non, depending on where I am in my writing. When I’m drafting a novel, I sit down to it every day. It’s not that I can’t write a story during that time—especially a short one that seems irresistible—but it will have to wait until the novel is done for the day. Once I’m in revisions, I can and often do work on multiple projects at the same time: several stories, stories and a novel, etcetera. This last summer, in fact, I was working on two books at once, revisions for the stories in Hurry Please I Want To Know and for the novel Second Life. Partly that was due to production schedules, but partly it’s how I’ve always worked. For instance, some of the stories in this collection were written during the revising of The German Woman. But the different worlds and works do feed one another. Collectors began as a four page story, one I wanted to include in Follow Me, but my editor felt it wasn’t full enough, was a fragment rather than a story, and so I put it aside until I was done with the collection. Then I came back to it, and realized it was the end of something much longer, and wrote backwards from there. That turned into Collectors. And both the beginning of and the main character in Second Life came to me, after a fashion, during the writing and revising of The German Woman.

I’d grown up watching Alistair Cooke on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater, his urbane British presence, so it was a shock to read headlines about his body being plundered, which came out about five years after his death. Though he was in his nineties when he died and died from cancer, his body, along with hundreds of others, was stripped for parts—skin, tendons, bone, et cetera—by an unscrupulous ring led by a dentist who’d lost his license. They would pay minimum wage workers in funeral homes and morgues a couple of hundred dollars to have access to corpses and then take what they knew they could sell—to implant surgeons, medical researchers, et cetera—for thousands of dollars. They’d kept meticulous records indicating that they forged death certificates for anyone over sixty, or who died of cancer or highly contagious diseases, which is how Cooke’s family was eventually notified of what had happened.

I read quite a bit about it at the time, but I was in the middle of writing and revising and still researching The German Woman, so eventually I stopped reading that and went back to working on the novel. After it was done, I began writing stories again, and in one of them, “Trapped in the Temple of Athena,” a minor character is a bone procurer. That story is in the Sarabande collection. After I finished it, I found myself still interested in her. How did she become a bone procurer? What’s that life like? What might it do to you to always be around the dead, and to see them—and sometimes the living—as a resource? Obviously such people help others—burn victims need skin, et cetera—but the gray areas are pretty large. And since that’s what I like to write and read about, it seemed natural to go back to this character, to write more about her, to research what her life might be like. And all of that turned into Second Life. She’s a quite different character than the one in the story collection, but that’s where she was born. It sounds fairly neat and orderly, describing it this way. But the process was pretty messy.

Rumpus: Your writing seems to be fueled, regardless of subject or style, by the question you’ve articulated here: “What’s that life like?” Would it be fair to call this a credo of your creative process?

I was reminded, as I read this response, of the author biography that accompanied your first novel, Collectors. I had to pull out my copy to be sure, but there it was. In addition to your literary accolades and education, the bio notes that you have “worked as a carpenter, painter, tour guide, and truck driver.” Were these deliberately experiential forms of research into the question “What’s that life like?” or accidental forays? How have your own experiences working beyond the page informed the work you do on the page?

Griner: Those jobs were, at first, simply to make money, though in time some of them—construction and painting, especially—became something more. I didn’t know any writers growing up and had no idea how to become one. I read constantly but only wrote one or two stories in high school and a couple more in college. None were any good, and I knew it. What I couldn’t figure out was how to make them better. I didn’t take any creative writing courses in college, where I was a history major and an English minor. And then when I graduated I painted houses for a bit, married, worked as a waiter, saved a lot of money and moved with my wife to Portugal, where I started writing in earnest. We stayed a year that first time, then moved to Boston, where I was a tour guide and worked construction. My partner was a painter, and so we’d take construction jobs and work ridiculous hours for weeks or months at a time, then get paid and take time off to do our own work. When the money ran out, we’d start up again. Some of the people I met in the construction world, which can be crazy, made their way into my stories, and those were the ones I used to apply to creative writing programs after my second stint in Portugal, and a year earning an MA in Romance Languages and Literatures. So, construction and painting became both a way to support my writing and a way to find stories, interesting people, situations that were both physically and metaphysically interesting. Three of the stories from my first collection are set in that world, and some of the characters in them are altered specters of guys I worked with, on construction sites, or while driving trucks and working in a warehouse. I went back to that world for a couple of stories in my most recent collection as well, and for some of the characters in Second Life.

Rumpus: So here’s a question for you as a full professor and a long-time director of the creative writing program at the University of Louisville: How have your life and work outside and beyond the classroom informed your presence within it and your personal teaching philosophy? Do you ever caution your undergraduate students against rushing off to graduate school in creative writing without a few years of real-world experience under their belts? Or does the academy, in your view, simply offer a different but no less real kind of experience for the next generation of writers?

Griner: I think that, except for in rare cases—and I certainly wasn’t one of them—it’s better not to go to graduate school for creative writing until you’re a bit older. I was twenty-seven when I went, and I was the youngest in my class. Partly, I think it’s better to have lived a bit more, but the biggest reason is one of perspective. Time in a good creative writing program is a gift, really, and if you’ve had some jobs that allow you little time to write before you go, you’re more likely to realize that and to really use your time wisely. I think the delay can also help you decide if this is something you absolutely have to do.

As for my life outside the classroom and in it, yes, they’ve certainly informed my teaching. I like to run a supportive workshop, having sat through one or two that were truly nasty—and therefore, from my perspective, wholly unhelpful. The writing world is hard enough without making the classroom difficult as well. Also, in a lot of the jobs I worked, I found people to be really curious and aware of the wider world, though often without means of expressing that. So I try to keep that in mind in all of my classes—that I’m dealing with people with complex lives who nonetheless really want to wrestle with the deep questions that literature asks. My job, as I see it, is in part to give them a space in which to do so.

Rumpus: I know this is a question I’ve been asked many times, and one I suspect I’ll be asked again and again throughout my life, so I’d like your take on it.The question in its baldest form is, “Do you believe creative writing can be taught?” It’s a bit like asking a carpenter, “Do you believe houses can be built?” or a plumber, “Do you believe pipes can be fixed?” But I think the question lurking beneath it is really “How can creative writing be taught? What are the best ways to teach writers how to grow in their curiosity and awareness of the wider world on the page?” When you were a graduate student of creative writing at Syracuse, I’m curious to know what the most valuable exercise or piece of advice you received from your teachers was and how it has sustained you. And now that you’re a teacher of creative writing yourself, what’s the most important thing you do to make those supportive workshops work?

Griner: Creative writing can be taught, to a degree, which may sound like a waffly answer, but I don’t think it is. Some things are probably innate—a love of language, of story, of form, of a properly turned phrase. But a lot of people have those things, without necessarily knowing how to channel their interest into actual stories or poems or novels or plays, or at least good ones. The creative writing classroom is a place—though not the only place—to help students figure out how to do that. Along those lines, I think a supportive classroom is best because people are far more willing to take chances when they feel safe, and that’s the swiftest way to become a better, more accomplished writer. But another part of that equation is, as you say, helping students grow in their awareness of a wider world on the page, so I try always to pick a range of texts, from standard greats to exciting newcomers, from print to the web, from “realistic” to “experimental,” when making up my CW class syllabi. Even if they don’t like Borges or Baldwin or Lispector first time around, being exposed to them or others they may not know is crucial. It’s natural to want to do or read what’s comfortable, but in the end that will stultify your work, so I always push students in their reading, especially when dealing with writers they might not have a natural sympathy with.

As for the most valuable things from my time at Syracuse, that’s easy: generosity, patience, precision, and stick-to-itiveness. Nobody was more generous, professionally and personally, than Stephen Dobyns, who introduced young writers to established ones and to editors and agents, as if his life depended on it. We all benefited from that. And Doug Unger, one of my workshop leaders, was an incredibly generous and rigorous reader and critic, a tricky balance but one I’ve tried to match. Finally, there was the time I spent with Toby Wolff, both as a student and a friend. At first I was intimidated by him, because I so admired his work, and during our workshop almost everything I wrote was awful. But I’ll never forget an hour sitting at his side as he edited one of those terrible stories, line by line and word by word. I realized during that hour how much more care he was taking with my work than I ever had and, subsequently, how much harder I had to work if I really wanted to improve, let alone make a life as a writer: the need for a nearly endless patience and focus, that was one of his many gifts to me. The stick-to-itiveness I guess came after; there were a lot of good writers in my class and in the years on either side of me. Some have gone on to great fame, some of us have published well, and some stopped writing. I don’t think looking at us at the time, you could have said which of us was likely to end up in which of those groups. Some of it was luck, but a lot was simply stubbornness, a refusal to give in or give up. I learned some of that on my own, but Toby helped teach me that too, over the course of many conversations about writing, life, et cetera. Having learned from others, I try to incorporate those lessons into my teaching as well, to help others along the path.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-paul-griner/feed/0Carol Ann Duffy’s First Ladieshttp://therumpus.net/2015/01/carol-ann-duffys-first-ladies/
http://therumpus.net/2015/01/carol-ann-duffys-first-ladies/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 22:00:24 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=134729In a playful reflection on the work and philosophy of poet Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson explores the possibilities for storytelling, feminism, and everyday entertainment through poetry. Winterson excerpts poems from The World’s Wife in the voices of historical better halfs real and imagined, from Dorothy Wordsworth with her daffodils to Mrs.]]>In a playful reflection on the work and philosophy of poet Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson explores the possibilities for storytelling, feminism, and everyday entertainment through poetry. Winterson excerpts poems from The World’s Wife in the voices of historical better halfs real and imagined, from Dorothy Wordsworth with her daffodils to Mrs. Sisyphus and Frau Freud. Without a doubt, Duffy’s work furthers her own argument that poetry can delight as it enlightens, and build bridges as it exposes uncomfortable truths.

Imagine a modern novelist who feels the breath of history on the back of her neck while writing her latest book. History insists on historical episodes being told with appropriate language. If the book takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, with characters who grew up during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and watched plays of Shakespeare, then it must follow that the language used in that narrative must be flowery and Elizabethan. And the author, to the best of her ability, must imitate the elaborate linguistic structures of the age she is describing.

That is one way of looking at the historical novel—a way that Jeanette Winterson approaches with suspicion if not outright hostility. In her new book, The Daylight Gate, Winterson’s narrative voice is as fresh and up-to-date as the latest message sent to the Twittersphere by Jennifer Weiner.

The Daylight Gate opens in the Forest of Pendle. The first chapter swiftly pulls us into Lancashire, the “untamed” northern part of England. The culturally deviant and the politically radical alike take refuge there (and so do the perpetrators of the Gunpowder Plot). The book’s narrator describes the forest in tight, spare prose reminiscent of Hemingway.

Those who are born here are branded by Pendle. They share a common mark. There is still a tradition, or a superstition, that a girl-child born in Pendle Forest should be twice baptized; once in church and once in a black pool at the foot of the hill. The hill will know her then. She will be its trophy and its sacrifice. She must make her peace with her birth-right, whatever that means.

The peddler John Law takes a short cut through this forest and he comes across Alizon Device, a witch, who puts a curse on him for his refusal to kiss her on the mouth. As a result, the poor man collapses and provides the thuggish defenders of the English crown with a convenient case for the prosecution of Pendle’s witch coven.

The statesmen’s motto, “Witchery popery popery witchery“, attests to their combined hatred of Britain’s Catholics and witches. Constable Hargreaves and Tom Peeper quickly take the matter to their hands. The Law case helps them satisfy their thirst for sexual and political power. Peeper rapes Sarah Device, one of the women he accuses of being a witch, but before his entourage are done with her the book’s protagonist, Alice Nutter, enters the scene and violently liberates the woman.

Jeanette Winterson

Alice is a fascinating, Dorian Gray-like figure whose age nobody knows and whose beauty nobody doubts. Her favorite color is magenta and she is often seen wearing elaborate ornaments of that color. Her “style” is one that Oscar Wilde or Walter Pater, those late-Victorian admirers of the Elizabethan age, would have loved describing in their essays. A favorite of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, Alice made a name for herself when the dye she had prepared in her workshop was discovered by the Queen. Even in the description of this colorful invention, Winterson is unwilling to use flowery language.

Her fortune had come through the invention of a dye; a magenta that held fast in water and that had a curious dark depth to it – like looking into a mirror made of mercury. The Queen had ordered vats of the stuff and Alice had worked for a long time in London, with her own dye-house and warehouse.

Late Victorians wouldn’t be the sole fans of Alice. Virginia Woolf, an Edwardian writer, would surely adore her for her ambiguous sexuality and her Orlando-like role-playing throughout the book. On the face of it Alice is lesbian, but she doesn’t shy away from sexual intercourse with men. The mixture of her radical politics, self-confidence and material wealth make her very attractive in the eyes of even her adversaries. Roger Nowell, the magistrate of Pendle Forest, is among those who admire and scrutinize her position; although he is assigned to investigate witch activity in the area, Nowell, a widower, feels attracted to Alice. There is an obvious discrepancy between Alice’s ambiguous character and the no-BS way that Winterson describes her. Winterson manages to describe this ambiguity lucidly. We sense that Alice is someone we would fall in love with but we are not quite sure why.

Winterson then introduces us to Christopher Southworth, a Jesuit priest and an old friend of Alice, who takes refuge in her room to evade the authorities. Physically, he is in a terrible shape:

When he had been captured after the Gunpowder Plot his torturers had cut his face with a hot iron. They had blinded him by dripping wax into his pinned-back eyeballs. The curious blue of his eyes was due to the elixir that had saved his sight. But nothing could hide the scars.

Southworth has returned to Pendle to save his sister, who is accused of being a Catholic and a conspirator. Winterson takes us on a tour of this politically bleak era, which she often compares to Elizabeth’s. Shakespeare, who appears here in three delightful scenes (in one scene we expect him to sleep with Alice) seems to represent the ethos of the Elizabethan age, while the reign of the fervently anti-papist James I finds its representatives in the bullying prosecutors and informers.

The Daylight Gate is a tastefully gothic tale and a page-turner at heart. Which is not to say that it lacks literary merit. On the contrary, the compulsive state in which one reads the book is a marvelous thing. In no place does Winterson approach her subject lightly; her dramatization of the trial of the Lancashire witches and the politically repressive era that preceded it is a passionate defense of the culture of witchery. The lucidness of the book’s prose attests to Winterson’s desire to appropriate the witch culture for a modern audience, whose cultural affinities with television shows like American Horror Story: Coven are perhaps stronger than their interest in the often impenetrable legal narratives of witch trials under the rule of King James I. The consistently tight prose of the book helps put the focus on the horrific nature of political repression in early seventeenth-century England. The reign of that authoritarian monarch had been so appalling that it doesn’t need the modern imitation of a colorful prose style to show its true nature.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/02/the-daylight-gate-by-jeanette-winterson/feed/0Lisa’s Book Round-Uphttp://therumpus.net/2013/11/lisas-book-round-up-4/
http://therumpus.net/2013/11/lisas-book-round-up-4/#commentsTue, 05 Nov 2013 18:00:36 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=120510I wouldn’t be much of a book columnist if I didn’t celebrate Alice Munro and her much deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. It surprises me, the number of people who have never read Munro. If you’re one of them, you might start here.]]>I wouldn’t be much of a book columnist if I didn’t celebrate Alice Munro and her much deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. It surprises me, the number of people who have never read Munro. If you’re one of them, you might start here.

“Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death. She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion. For as long as I’m immersed in a Munro story, I am according to an entirely make-believe character the kind of solemn respect and quiet rooting interest that I accord myself in my better moments as a human being.”

Todd VanDerWerff wrote a piece for A.V. Club introducing Munro newbies to her work and he captures the essence of her magic and really, the power of anyone who engages in artistic endeavors: “…the entirety of any human being’s life can feel suitably epic when examined under the right scope. Everyone has the potential for grand drama and tragedy, and that’s without ever once leaving home.”

I think about my writing that way sometimes, as a profound exploration of what is and what was, the words excavating my living memory.

Like Franzen, fiction is my religion but memoir sits next to it on the altar. Especially memoir that transcends the writer’s experience and makes me question my own. Like in high school when I read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or more recently Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, and especially Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home. Anyone who knows me is probably sick of me recommending this book but there’s something about Bechdel’s grappling with her past both in words and in drawings that gives me that clichéd “can’t put the book down and can’t stop thinking about it” moment.

I’m not giving anything away by telling you that Fun Home is about Bechdel’s complex relationship with her father. And his suicide. And sexual orientation and dysfunctional families. Because the story is ultimately about what Bechdel does to confront these haunting wounds.

I was in New York City this past weekend and had a chance to see the musical adaptation of Fun Home at the Public Theater. I was flummoxed as to how the subject material would translate to the stage, let alone a musical, but it did–kudos to Jeanine Tesori (music) and Lisa Kron (book & lyrics). There are three powerful actresses who portray the author as a child, as a young woman, and as the middle-aged woman Bechdel is now. In the final scene, all three actresses stand on stage together and it is a physical reclamation of the whole self, the culmination of Bechdel’s exploration and healing.

Before the show started, I struck up a conversation with a gentleman sitting next to me. He was well into his 80’s and seemed a bit perturbed that his wife had dragged him to a show he knew nothing about. That made me nervous. I wasn’t sure how he’d respond to the subject material. By the end of the show, he was clutching his wife’s hand and his sobs joined mine. I’m not just recommending you read Fun Home, I implore you to read it, and if you’re anywhere near New York City before December 1st, go see this show.

I couldn’t take Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch with me on my trip because the book (at 784 pages) weighs almost two pounds so instead I brought the much slimmer poetry book Hum, written by fellow Grinder, Jamaal May. This book won the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, has some of the most creative cover art I’ve seen all year, as well as one of the best inscriptions: “Dedicated to the interior lives of Detroiters.” With poem titles such as “If They Hand Your Remains to Your Sister in a Chinese Takeout Box,” “The Boy Who Bathes the Dead,” and “How to Get Your Gun Safely Out of Your Mouth,” this isn’t your average poetry collection. May blends the urban and mundane with the glorious.

I love too many women is not the best lead-infor a conversation that will endwith me telling you I love youfor the first time. And this might not bethe best first date topic. I know this,but I know it the same waytwelve-year-old me knew the firecrackerin my hand would be a dull burstlost in the grass if I let it go too soon—

I met Ron Hogan in New York City and he writes reviews and features for Shelf Awareness. If you like book blogs and I’m thinking you might because you’re reading this column, Shelf Awareness is one of the best.

“Holy shit read this book. Read this book. Here’s how good the book is: I’m a 34 year old college professor and this thing’s about 17 year old high school cheerleaders and the dark jockeying done among young women and I couldn’t get enough of this thing. Couldn’t read it fast enough. The story’s superb, sure, but the writing, my god: if Megan Abbott’s next book isn’t splashed everywhere and made as big a deal of as, say, Gone Girl, I want my money back (you hear me book industry!??!?). This fucking thing’s merciless. The details hardly matter: just get it and read it. If this isn’t the year’s most propulsive read, I’ll eat my boots whole.”

Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season is one of my favorite novels from the past year and so I was thrilled to discover she won Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the nation’s biggest literary prize for African-American writers. Congrats Attica Locke!

My last day in New York happened to be the same day as the New York Marathon. I walked from my hotel to watch runners make their way along Central Park South to the finish line. It was a perfect day: cool, overcast, and the leaves in the park were in full autumn flair.

Eleven years ago, I ran that very same stretch. I’ll never forget it. The utter physical exhaustion was mitigated only by the thought of my family waiting to celebrate with me at the end, my husband holding our two young daughters, one on each hip. I was running to get to the finish line banner as much as I was running to get to them. This marathon I was alone in the city. My kids, one in middle school and the other in high school, were waiting for me back in California and my ex-husband had just emailed me the day before to tell me he was moving in with this girlfriend.

A female runner made her way down the stretch. The crowd cheered, cowbells clanged. I thought about Bechdel, her three selves standing separately on that stage, and I wanted to let a part of myself go. The part that still looks for the family at the finish line. So I imagined her climbing over the barrier and taking off, running. I clapped for her and then turned around and headed back down 5th Avenue.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2013/11/lisas-book-round-up-4/feed/0Authors Deface Own Books for Charityhttp://therumpus.net/2013/04/authors-deface-own-books-for-charity/
http://therumpus.net/2013/04/authors-deface-own-books-for-charity/#commentsTue, 30 Apr 2013 16:00:56 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=113796Literary organization English PEN has chosen an interesting way to raise funds: ask authors to annotate first editions of their books, and then auction them off.

J. K. Rowling is the prize catch in terms of predicted auction money, but 49 other writers are participating, from Philip Pullman to Jeanette Winterson.

J. K. Rowling is the prize catch in terms of predicted auction money, but 49 other writers are participating, from Philip Pullman to Jeanette Winterson.

…Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, looking through his first book of poems, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966, adds a note to “The Early Purges” which might well have been accompanied by a sigh: “One of the most popular in schools since it can start a good argument. But at this stage, I’d like to rewrite it.”

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2013/04/authors-deface-own-books-for-charity/feed/0Albums of Our Lives: The Thermals’ The Body The Blood The Machinehttp://therumpus.net/2013/02/albums-of-our-lives-the-thermals-the-body-the-blood-the-machine/
http://therumpus.net/2013/02/albums-of-our-lives-the-thermals-the-body-the-blood-the-machine/#commentsWed, 06 Feb 2013 17:45:30 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=110713It begins with an act of divine intervention. “God reached his hand down from the sky,” sings Hutch Harris. “He flooded the land, then he set it afire/ He said, ‘Fear me again, you know I’m your father/ Remember that no one can breathe underwater.’”

The melody, already rapid-fire agitprop in the style of early-80s Billy Bragg, intensifies, and a drumbeat.

]]>It begins with an act of divine intervention. “God reached his hand down from the sky,” sings Hutch Harris. “He flooded the land, then he set it afire/ He said, ‘Fear me again, you know I’m your father/ Remember that no one can breathe underwater.’”

The melody, already rapid-fire agitprop in the style of early-80s Billy Bragg, intensifies, and a drumbeat. “So bend your knees and bow your heads/ Save your babies, here’s your future.” And then Harris is screaming, “Yeah, here’s your future,” and the guitars get loud and the drums get loud and if heads aren’t already nodding, they probably are now.

For me, The Thermals’ “Here’s Your Future” has one of the most riveting openings to a punk rock record I’ve heard in the last ten years. It’s also lyrically clumsy, politically ham-fisted, and rarely approaches subtlety. And I rarely go a week without listening to some part of it.

***

The core of the group, Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster, had played together in groups before this one; listening to The Thermals beside, say, the duo recordings they released under the name Hutch & Kathy, it’s pretty clear that the same sensibility is at work. 2006’s The Body The Blood The Machine, the album that “Here’s Your Future” opens,honed a particular direction for them, towards more thematically focused works; the album as meditation on a particular topic. The two albums that they’ve made since then, 2009’s Now We Can See and 2010’s Personal Life have both taken on larger conceptual frameworks but done so more elegantly, without some of the ham-fistedness that shows up here. Here, The Thermals have set these ten songs in a near-future United States overtaken by a particularly conservative and bigoted strain of Christianity.

The collages that dot the album’s artwork — an aesthetic descendent of Dead Kennedys collaborator Winston Smith and the juxtaposition-prone John Yates — are not subtle as they evoke rote Christian imagery and Bush-era culture clashes. The cover features Jesus with his eyes covered by a black bar, and other art features the Ten Commandments overlapping the Capitol’s architecture, a heavily redacted document with “ATTENTION ESCAPISTS!” at the top, and a car’s rear-view mirror where surging flames are visible.

Over the course of The Body The Blood The Machine’s ten songs, some of them frenetic in their tempo and others content to proceed with a stately chug, the society described on the album is delineated; the narrator of several of these songs vacillates between wanting to run from this society and (in “A Return to the Fold”) embracing it. If you’re thinking Nineteen Eighty-Four here, you’re in the right ballpark. There’s more than a little fascism in the society described — from the references to a “new master race” in the opener to the mention of “Nazi halos” in “I Might Need You to Kill.” Listening to these songs, it isn’t clear if Harris and Foster are suggesting that this is the end point of modern conservatism or if they’ve opted to go for a worst of all possible worlds, one where a kind of Christian Identity-based state has arisen. In the end, it might not matter — The Body The Blood The Machine is a powerful album, but it isn’t a particularly nuanced one.

***

I’ve never been sure why this album has gripped me as much as it does. I have friends who experienced in their youth a give-and-take between fundamentalist Christianity and punk rock, and others who have told stories of faiths that aren’t too far removed from the borderline-fascist creed referenced here. This year, I’ve read Jeanette Winterson’s terrifying account of growing up in a repressive branch of Christianity in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? I’ve read the political writers Will Saletan and Ross Douthat discuss the evolution of Christianity, and the ways in which it’s been adopted by the politically conservative.This has not been my experience with Christianity. I grew up Episcopalian. There wasn’t much in the way of repression to be found there: no fear of damnation, no conflict between the books I read and the messages I heard in church on Sunday mornings. And while I can remember driving home from church with a Bad Religion tape playing on my car’s stereo, I never found much transgressive about my listening habits and the faith I’d been raised in, even as I got more and more into punk rock. About the only part of this album that really resonates with any vestige of my younger self is Harris’s line in “A Pillar of Salt” about “our filthy bodies,” though that (for me) had little to do with any concept of sin and desire.

***

For all that I find some of the imagery and wordplay here heavy-handed, though, there’s no rule that punk rock needs to be subtle. For every Against Me! playing textual and narrative games with their lyrics to a smart poltical end, there’s a Team Dresch, who well understand that the best political critiques are often the loudest. (“Hate The Christian Right” is an utterly brutal attack on a specific series of conservative politics; it’s loud and savage in its sentiments, and it’s impossible to forget.) The Body The Blood The Machine isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s not like it needs to be.

Even so, that doesn’t explain why this album hits so close to home for me — there are plenty of punk records that hit on a visceral level, but haven’t wormed themselves into my head the way this one has. My own mild philosophical differences with Episcopalianism seem insufficient grounds for my gut-level appreciation of such a gut-level attack on Christianity.

And yet, for all that I would probably point a newcomer to The Thermals to Now We Can See or Personal Life, it’s The Body The Blood The Machine that I return to again and again, looking for that same thrill and that same rush. I don’t think that this is an example of the tired old “punk rock became my religion” trope, but I also worry that it isn’t far from it, that my attraction to this album suggests that its fears of the allure of an all-controlling religious devotion are more resonant than I might like to admit. Alternately, as Harris sings with equal parts elation and terror: here’s your future.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2013/02/albums-of-our-lives-the-thermals-the-body-the-blood-the-machine/feed/1Notes from Jeanette Winterson’s Reading at McNally Jacksonhttp://therumpus.net/2012/03/notes-from-jeanette-wintersons-reading-at-mcnally-jackson/
http://therumpus.net/2012/03/notes-from-jeanette-wintersons-reading-at-mcnally-jackson/#commentsMon, 26 Mar 2012 20:05:14 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=99463Jeanette Winterson has the best-named memoir: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She spoke about the story behind the title during her reading at McNally Jackson bookstore in NYC:

When Jeanette W. was fifteen, she fell in love with another girl and couldn’t hide it.

When Jeanette W. was fifteen, she fell in love with another girl and couldn’t hide it. Her mother, referred to as “Mrs. Winterson,” staged an exorcism (no joke). Of exorcisms, Jeanette W. says, “You go in feeling strong, and you leave feeling the devil is inside you.”

Mrs. Winterson issued an ultimatum: “Give up the girl or leave home.” As Jeanette W. packed her bags, Mrs. Winterson asked, “Why are you doing this?” Jeanette W. said, “To be happy.” Mrs. Winterson then asked, “Why be happy when you could be normal?”

Jeanette W. wondered if this was a false question. Now she believes when you do the right thing, you are not happy. You often feel worse than you did in the comfortable wrong place. But that’s life.

Other things Jeanette W. said (some are quotations from her book):

– The opening line of her novel Written on the Body is: “Why is the measure of love loss?” She wrote that twenty years ago, and she no longer believes it. She calls it a “young” thought. She now believes in the daily rising of love, reliable as the sun.

– “The Kindle is like phone sex–it’ll do but you have to go home to have the real thing.”

– “Life has an inside as well as an outside.”

– “Our interest in art is our interest in ourselves.”

– Trust yourself as a writer. Let your creativity tell you what to do. Allow it to be chaotic. Be absorbed and delighted by your obsessions.

– When she read the line “I pondered the horrors of heterosexuality…” out of her book, the room could not stop laughing. Then she added, “Think of me as Mitt Romney.” [Maybe “you had to be there.”]

– Going bonkers takes time. Respect your own craziness.

– She doesn’t write in sequence. She doesn’t number her pages until the end.

– On revisiting the past: you understand memoirs in a new way. Open locked places to redeem them. The psyche tends towards healing. Creativity drives to keep you sane, whole.

– This is a book about hope. It is experiments in experience. She believes there are three endings in all of history: 1) revenge, 2) tragedy, 3) forgiveness. Forgiveness is the only thing that can move something along. Invest in forgiveness.

– “Make sure Obama is reelected,” she said.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2012/03/notes-from-jeanette-wintersons-reading-at-mcnally-jackson/feed/1Jeanette Winterson on Grief, Being “Post-Heterosexual”http://therumpus.net/2010/03/jeanette-winterson-on-grief-being-post-heterosexual/
http://therumpus.net/2010/03/jeanette-winterson-on-grief-being-post-heterosexual/#commentsSun, 07 Mar 2010 19:00:49 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=46645“Susie (Orbach) calls herself post-heterosexual. I like that description because I like the idea of people being fluid in their sexuality. I don’t for instance consider myself to be a lesbian. I want to be beyond those descriptive constraints.”

“Over the years I’ve had five letters from people saying that what I wrote stopped them killing themselves.”

“A lot of people … sidestep the pain, by taking pills or moving on or whatever.

]]>“Susie (Orbach) calls herself post-heterosexual. I like that description because I like the idea of people being fluid in their sexuality. I don’t for instance consider myself to be a lesbian. I want to be beyond those descriptive constraints.”

“Over the years I’ve had five letters from people saying that what I wrote stopped them killing themselves.”

“A lot of people … sidestep the pain, by taking pills or moving on or whatever. But I didn’t think any of that would work. The pain would come back again and again if I didn’t live in the grief. And the thought of it coming back was awful, unbearable. I’d rather have died.”